Monday 2 June 2008

Sod heap

Right, I've read the book (it's brilliant - despite a generous smattering of typos) so this weekend we decided to start on the allotment. We're going to spend a few weekends putting in a couple of hours a day (contrary to The Book's advice) until we're up and running, then we plan on following the half and hour a day principle (perhaps with the odd weekend splurge).

So on Saturday, Alan and I headed to the allotment for some good, hard digging. Alan was very keen to do some digging, he wasn't too bothered where, he just couldn't wait to get into some decent digging.

We spend an hour and a half digging and edging two small areas. One is to be Abi's Plot - we need to get this sorted pretty quickly to trying and keep her interested. The other area was formerly a bean trench and we intend to grow beans in some of it again.

Following advice from our allotment neighbor, we decided not to cut/strim the couch grass first, we just dug up manageable sized sods. The Book suggests that we pile the sods up, grass-side down and cover the resulting heap in dark plastic to reduce light and increase heat, we are assured that: "The couch grass will eventually die and rot down, and you will be left with a beautiful pile of topsoil and well rotted organic matter to use on your plot" - we'll let you know when that happens.

Here is our sod heap, which we decided to position in a gap between the red current bushes which we thought might be hard to utilise in any other way (need to get hold of some thick black plastic now):

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